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Six Reasons Not To “Heart” Mike Huckabee

May 6, 2015by terrance

Former Arkansas governor and Fox News personality Mike Huckabee is back on the campaign trail again, after announcing his second attempt to win the GOP presidential nomination. Huckabee may try to turn on the charm and moderate his extremist views, but beneath his good-old-boy exterior beats the heart of a theocrat, a homophobe, a hypocrite, and a con man.

The addition of Mike Huckabee — along with Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina — to the ever more crowded field of GOP presidential hopefuls officially makes this the week of the long-shot GOP candidates. Huckabee’s path to the White House is a narrow one, and navigating it will depend on his ability to keep cultural conservatives in his corner, and moderate his views enough to keep from scaring more mainstream voters away. That’s a tall order, for a candidate with a record like Mike Huckabee’s.Mike Huckabee Wants to Keep the Poor Poor

Huckabee’s positions on economic issues are about as extreme as his positions on social issues. Huckabee may bill himself as a fiscal conservative, but even some of his fellow conservatives call him “Tax Hike Mike.” That’s because of Huckabee’s support for a consumption tax.

Of course, Huckabee is either deluded or dishonest when he claims that the wealthy would pay more under a consumption tax, “Because rich people consume more.” The reality is that low-income families would bear a greater tax burden, because they spend more of their income to buy the things they need than wealthy families do. Huckabee’s “fair tax” would ensure that the rich get a tax break, while the poor get poorer.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee said. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

With the Supreme Court set to rule on marriage equality this summer, and likely make it legal across the country, Mike Huckabee has joined right-wingers in declaring that such a ruling would lead to all kinds of disaster, and make America more like Nazi Germany.

On the Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” program, Huckabee warned that gay rights advocates, “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel.”

Huckabee’s ideas about women aren’t quite medieval, but they’re at least Victorian. Last January, at the Republican party’s annual winter meeting, Huckabee said that the Democratic party told women, “they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” Huckabee then went on to argue that Republicans aren’t waging war on women, but “they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.”

Right. Women who use birth control are “victims of their gender.”

A few months later, in an interview with The New Republic, Huckabee explained that while male opponents were “common,” women required “a sense of a pedestal.” “You treat some things as a special treasure; you treat other things as common,” Huckabee explained. Huckabee went even further in an email to Salon, explaining that, while he believes in equality, “equality doesn’t mean sameness.”

I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything – how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school and making sure they’re kind of sheltered and shielded from so many things – and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable for either a preteen or a teen in some of the lyrical content and choreography of Beyoncé, who has sort of a regular key to the door" of the White House.

Mike Huckabee’s own son, David Huckabee, once lost his job as a Boy Scout camp counselor for killing a stray dog, by hanging him by his neck, slitting his throat, and stoning him to death, and was once arrested for having a gun in his bag at the airport in Little Rock, Arkansas. So, Huckabee might want to ease up on criticizing anyone else’s parenting.

On the outside chance that he gets elected, Huckabee will have the dubious distinction of being the only president to start in an informercial. In March, news surfaced that Huckabee appeared as a spokesman for Barton Publishing’s “Diabetes Solution Kit.” In an informercial for the kit, Huckabee explained that prescription drugs for type I and type II diabetes were really designed to turn patients into, “loyal, pill-popping, finger-pricking, insulin-shooting customer[s], so Big Pharma and the mainstream medical community can rake in over $100 billion annually.” Viewers could learn the “truth” for just $19.97.

Huckabee has also lent his name, face and reputation to people hawking “natural” cures for Alzheimers, financial firms that defraud their customers, and even one group that claimed to have found the cure for cancer — in the Bible, of course.

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Oh, come on. Christian Bale has a point. If Moses were around today — “hearing voices” and acting out — he’d probably be diagnosable as schizophrenic. After all, when people “hear voices” today, they end up as mental health patients, not prophets.